Keys to Nonprofit Startup Success

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In this podcast I talk with Kathleen Kelly-Janus, author of Social Startup Success. In this interview we talk about the different factors involved in building a nonprofit into a sustainable, profitable (yes, you can make money) and affective organization.

Kathleen is an award-winning social entrepreneur, author and lecturer at Stanford University. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Tech Crunch and the San Francisco Chronicle.

In this podcast (and in her book) Kathleen gives real life examples of how successful nonprofits went from start up to sustainable. Examples of this include:

Testing ideas by engaging stakeholders and reframing failure as learning, like Aspire Public Schools did to
devise a creative solution to ineffective preschool education in low-income communities.
Measuring impact as you track the positive outcomes of your organization and maximize that data, like At the
Crossroads did to create stages of progress as they reached out to homeless youth in San Francisco.
Funding experimentation to find a funding model true to your goals and effective at raising money, like Hot
Bread Kitchen did when they both raised money and sold bread to sustain their training program for low-income
women to find jobs in the food industry.
Leading collaboratively by building a team and creating an environment where people feel empowered and
appreciated, like the crowdfunding platform Kiva did by allowing employees to manage their own success
metrics.
Telling compelling stories to share the work you’re doing, like founder of the Center for Youth Wellness
Nadine Burke Harris did in a TED talk that’s been viewed over 2.5 million times.